Stan McChrystal, Dick Cheney, and the Nuances of "Torture"

The reporter who uncovered the unthinkable — that the man the Obama administration just tapped to lead the fight in Afghanistan allegedly oversaw harsh interrogations in Iraq — wonders if the Bush administration isn't so wrong about pushing boundaries PLUS: Who the hell is Stan McChrystal?Click here for all the details.

Let me start by bashing liberals. I haven't done that in a while. As a special bonus to the loyal Republican readers who write me so much hate mail, I may even defend Dick Cheney.

The news that President Obama picked General Stanley McChrystal to run the war in Afghanistan put an old story of mine into the national spotlight last week. In 2006, Esquire sent me around the country to interview military interrogators with a Human Rights Watch investigator named Marc Garlasco. One of those men worked at Camp Nama, a small base near Baghdad where a Special Forces task force was interrogating Iraqis in an effort to find the head of Al Qaeda in Iraq. It was so secret that the officers went by false names there. Bad things happened. They doused people in cold water, used isolation and stress positions and sleep manipulation. These methods all appeared on a checklist. To use each one, they had to check the appropriate box and get approval.

The chain of command for that approval went through General McChrystal. Even more damning, the interrogator told us that he actually saw McChrystal in the camp while such acts were occurring. He also said that his supervisor told him and his colleagues that McChrystal had made a personal promise that the Red Cross would never be allowed into the camp — a violation of our treaty obligations under the Geneva Conventions, which is a violation of the law that we used to follow before the Bush sdministration.

This news comes at a time when the political war over what everyone now calls "torture" is reaching a high point — when Cheney and many other Republicans are arguing that we should keep on torturing because it worked, when this inevitable sentence appeared in the Washington Times: "a leader of the antiwar group Code Pink said she now wonders at what point her organization should begin to refer to Mr. Obama as a 'war criminal.'"

The Right Man for the Job, Taken to Task

I called Garlasco to get his take. Should we fight against McChystal's appointment?

"That's a tough one," he says.

First, there's the much discussed dilemma of whether to follow orders. Apparently this is incredibly easy for armchair moralists; in the military, it's grounds for a court-martial, but Garlasco sees it as more complex. "You have this kind of line," he says. "You can only go so high to get authorization for something — once you go to the president of the United States and he tells you it's okay, it's okay. But there's also this invisible line that should be within all of us — if the president says killing babies and puppies is alright, you should know it's not alright."

With that, we enter the dread Land of Nuance, because it depends on what the president tells you to do. Hold that thought.

Second, there's the war effort. "I defend McChrystal to myself because I think he's the right guy for the job," Garlasco says. (Click here for more on McChrystal's underreported history.) His reasoning is interesting. McChrystal is "in the Petraeus model, a new-thinking guy who is not thinking in terms of massive troops and kinetic kills, but non-lethal power — economic issues, winning the population over. In that mold, he's the right guy." So McChrystal's Special Forces skills could lead to less bloodshed and more effective aid programs.

Furthermore, McChrystal is a Special Forces expert in a fight where the Special Forces are pivotal. "So many of the problems over there are either because of the Special Forces, or can be improved by the Special Forces," Garlasco says. For instance, the SF guys are the ones looking for the HVTs, the "high-value targets." So they go to people's homes and kick down their doors and make everybody hate them. And they tend to go into fights with light forces and then call in air strikes if they get into trouble, which is how more than 100 civilians were killed in Bala Baluk. "They're really alienating the population. That's the kind of stuff we need stopped. So you bring in someone who understands those forces that are causing the problem."

But how do you balance that against the acts McChrystal enabled at Nama?

"I don't know," Garlasco says. "Perhaps what we need in the confirmation hearing is to hear what he did in Nama."

Why Cheney Might Not Be a Monster

These tough questions, and the prospect of McChrystal's confirmation hearings offering answers to them, brings us back to that Land of Nuance. Remember when liberals ridiculed Bush because he didn't "do" nuance? Now it's liberals who don't want to do nuance. They say the phrase "enhanced interrogation" is an evil equivocation straight from the Nazi lawyers, that torture is the only appropriate word.

But they didn't waterboard anybody at Nama. Which brings us right back to the questions that stumped the Bush administration way back in 2002: Is cold water torture? Is isolation torture? Is lack of sleep torture? For how long, and in what combination?

The easy answer is not to even think about it, just to follow the Geneva Conventions. But consider this passage from The Interrogators, an excellent and widely ignored book by a former military interrogator and a Los Angeles Times reporter that offers a glimpse inside the prisons of Afghanistan early in the war:

Steve had made it clear that he thought we were being overly deferential to the Conventions, that we were unnecessarily depriving ourselves of effective techniques that, he implied, were used routinely by other interrogators in other wars. He spoke with authority and experience... He told us at one point that hard-core prisoners were unlikely to start cracking until about fourteen hours into an interrogation, and it was clear that he wasn't just pulling this number out of his head. Our experiences at Kandahar and in the early weeks at Bagram told us he was right. It had become increasingly clear to us that some of the best intelligence we were collecting was coming in the latter stages of lengthy interrogations...

These interrogations weren't about finding a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq, the motive the left is joyfully ascribing to Cheney. They were about stopping suicide bombers from killing young American boys and girls. And there was real-time feedback, so let's stop the pretense that we have to raid old CIA files to find out if this stuff works — or that Cheney is a monster for making the argument that it does. (It's the argument that we should do it because it works that's morally depraved.)

Another passage:

Following the rules to the letter was the safe route. Even entertaining the idea of doing otherwise was to invite "slippage." But the trouble was that the safe route was ineffective. Prisoners overcame the [legal] model almost effortlessly, confounding us not with clever cover stories but with simple refusal to cooperate. They offered lame stories, pretended not to remember even the most basic details, and then waited for the consequences that never came.

How Far Does the Benefit of the Doubt Extend?

Today it seems obvious that it's wiser to follow the rules and avoid slippage, especially given the shameful partisanship that has led so many Republicans to defend waterboarding. Without a clear moral line, these folks would bring back the Inquisition just to avoid saying they were wrong.

But I'm not eager to judge soldiers on the battlefield who pushed the line to save their lives. I'm certainly not going to call them torturers for violating the Geneva Convention with a 14-hour interrogation. And, like Garlasco, I would be very cautious judging someone like McChrystal, a soldier my president has chosen to put his confidence in, a man who could end up saving tens of thousands of lives.

To that end, if we're going to give McChrystal the benefit of the doubt because he's useful, even though he had "command responsibility" over a camp where some forms of torture almost certainly occurred, shouldn't we extend at least some tiny portion of that doubt to those CIA interrogators? And to the lawyers who wrote the torture memos thinking they were helping stop the guys who attacked the World Trade Center? What about Dick Cheney, who was at least always honest about his belief that we had to go to the "dark side" to win this nasty new kind of war.

Okay, maybe that's going too far.

But if we are going to judge the past, we can't just use the word "torture" as a stick to beat up Republicans. We will have to walk down the slippery slope with them, pondering the nuances. Decency and fair judgment require it.

Questions? Comments? Concerns? Click here to e-mail John H. Richardson about his weekly political column at Esquire.com.

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